Anyone have any experiences with these? I've set up an Invisionboard forum www.giftyourgoods.com/forums, but I'm wondering if maybe one of the PHP style ones would be nicer?
Input?
Darla
Personally I have been a big fan of Invisionboard. phpBB has more users and developers and php-Nuke is a complete Content Management System and has plugins or mods that support phpBB or Invision board.
Personally I like Invision better than phpBB, but that is just my opinion.
I started to mess around with a phpbb yesterday after I posted, it seemed to have alot of cool features, but it wasn't as easy and fast to set up as the invisionboard and since I already have it going too, I guess I'll hang on to it. I also tried setting up a php-nuke, gosh what a mess, I am very UNfond of that thing! Invisionboard it is! Only thing now is my homepage totally clashes with my forum lol.
Thanks!
Darla
Did you think PHPbb was hard to install? I've used it on several servers (even a free Lycos account) and never had any trouble with it.
I've played with the UBB trial and that is VERY nice, but alas not free :-\
No, what I meant was that not installing it, but setting up the forums for it was not as fast an easy as the Invisionboard was. I signed for hosting with CyberTarp.com, whom I'm very impressed with, and they have Invisionboard in my control panel along with phpbb and php-nuke. And I thought Invisionboard does have an unlimited free trial? http://www.invisionboard.com/
I could be wrong, I didn't download it cause it's on my server, but maybe you could check it out.
Darla
Gift Your Goods
www.giftyourgoods.com
I have never had great luck with phpNuke. Usually why I use phpWebsite for content management solutions.
I have always like Invisionboard, but got my request thumbed down by the other two admins at a website I am helping to develop. Hell, it had Cpanel7, so we could point an click installs of XMB, phpBB, and invision.
Good luck with your site.
phpNuke is very poorly written code. I have looked through some of the files in its code-base and have to say that it would be hard to write code that is worse than that.
phpBB is okay code, but I think the quality control is seriously lacking. Code gets added into the codebase without the proper security checks leading to the current 'free security hole with every release' scenario. Not a good look.
I have used InvisionBoard and think that it is really solid package, easy to use and very stable. Its certainly what I would go for.
Moved to Scripts forum.
I'll backup a.koepke on this one - my experience w/ these 3 PHP-based forums has been the same. After having reviewed the code for each and tested each in a production environment, I ultimately prefer IPB over the other two.
I put phpNuke (didn't install, it was a package installer) on my site first, I didn't care for it. Then I found OpenSourcCMS (http://www.opensourcecms.com/) lets you test the admin of many different open source/free php based portals/cms/forums/ect
I went through quite a few, and decided on XOOPS. It has phpBB in it (now I've got to figure out a way to turn off some blocks when in the forum *S*). Oh, XOOPS has SMARTY which allows us to FTP a new theme, then we have to go through admin to upload the tar.gz. I'm skinned now *S*
Geeklog was pretty nice too, but I think I read that it required globals to be on, which I can't have on my host. I don't remember now if it had a forum. I think it did.
There's a LOT there at OpenSource, go through and see which ones you like best *S*
If you do decide on XOOPS, a few things I found a bit tricky were:[list=1] The homepage didn't have any content. I had to go back into admin/general/preferences to tell which mod to put on homepage (chose news)
I'd installed a photo album mod, sent one of the albums to my friend. She wasn't allowed to view it. Had to go into groups to enable a lot of stuff for anonymous group so they'd be visible. I've still got forum replies/comments set up to registered only though *S*
Not really that tricky, but the mods are not installed after the package is installed. You'll need to install the included mods yourself from the admin panel. That way you can choose what you want. There's also mods available at their XOOPS forum. I've installed 3, 2 worked (weather didn't).[/list=1]
Invision Power Board all the way. Ive used it for around a year, and I have joyfuly written 2 and a half mods lol. Matt Mecham is my idol! Seriously.
-Tristan Wells
How about from a user standpoint?
I really like the way vBulletin handles forums, but it's a bit costly. I looked at Ikonboard, and that seems good; as does phpBB.
I'm not a huge forum poster. In fact, Dev Shed is the first place I've really gotten into posting in forums like these. I've always been a newsgroups and mailing list kinda guy, but I'm now faced with the problem of having to implement a message board on a client's web site. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the intricacies of each forum suite to be able to make an informed choice.
So, which (free?) forum software do you like using (not from an administrative perspective but, rather, from a user perspective) the best?
Thanks. :)
Colin
Originally posted by cww
How about from a user standpoint?
I really like the way vBulletin handles forums, but it's a bit costly.
vBulletin a bit costly? Are you serious? Calling vBulletin costly is like branding a Honda Civic a luxury sports car. The software only costs $160 per license! How can a reasonable person call that costly?
Keep in mind that not too long ago the dominant player in the web forum business was infopop (http://www.infopop.com/). They had (and still have) a perl-based forum, called Ultimate Bulletin Board (ever wonder why the PEAR class for handling forum markup is called the UBB class? ;) ). UBB started at $2,000 - and went up in price, depending on the number of employees in your organization, the type of license you purchased, the features you wanted, etc. vBulletin came in and stole the wind from UBB's sails.
Regardless of the history lesson, though, I still cannot understand people who say that vB is expensive.
In this case, it's costly simply because it's not free. My client is a rock band that's not yet very well known, so they're on a fairly strict budget and don't want to pay for something they can get for free.
Also, I didn't know about infopop. As I said, I am very unfamiliar with these types of message boards.
I am still looking for suggestions, though. I would appreciate any you might have.
Thanks.
Colin
Ikonboard has a php version? Hmmmm.. I need to get with the times. Anyway, I started with phpBB, and found the code difficult to work with when adding different things on to the board(personal scripts specified for my site). Invision Power Board is excellent as far as I'm concerned, and of all the things for phpBB to not have in a profile, BIRTHDAY! How can you NOT have age or birthdate in a profile? IPB all da way.